Ron Lewis

From an artist and animator’s perspective, it would be very easy to be biased on a SpiderMan film. We’ve seen several variations on the telling of the wall-crawling creep’s tale and with every telling, I was supportive!!! From the comic, to the 1960’s animated television series, and on and on.......we got to look at SpiderMan from the eyes of directors who seemed to bring their take on what seemed to be the same story. And to be honest......how many times CAN one tell the story of SpiderMan??? SpiderMan: Into The Spiderverse has brazenly taken us on a journey the likes of which no animated——-OR——-SpiderMan film has ever done!!!! As an animator and artist, I was of course drawn to the story BUT what really hooked me was the need of the writers and directors to push the visual limits of this film. It could have been just another CG animated film and at first, I thought it was going to be and so.....I had low expectations. But then......I saw the hodge-podge of rendering effects. Sony and its directing team was clearly trying to make this a moving comic book. And they succeeded. I mean.....who would have thought to convert all the highlights and lighting.......to HALFTONES??? HALFTONES are a gradient pattern made up of dots used in comic books (pre 1990’s) to suggest continuous tone and also used as overlays (think Roy Lictinstien). The use of HALFTONES to wrap around each character and to seemingly create a look that can probably never be imitated was, for all intense and purposes, AMAZING!!!! If I were to see this effect used again in another film, I would compare it to the arrogance of laypeople who claim that they could reproduce a Jackson Pollock. They probably could......or not......but the look development geniuses at SONY showed us something amazing.....that there are still things in which to marvel. SONY, this should be the answer to your Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs snub. Well done, team!!!!